


Little Albatross

by teprometo



Category: Firefly, Merlin (TV), Serenity (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/M, Family, Friendship, Loyalty, Mental Instability, Mild Gore, Minor Character Death, Outer Space, POV Second Person, Protectiveness, Remix, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-23 00:06:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3748201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teprometo/pseuds/teprometo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's too loud inside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Albatross

**Author's Note:**

  * For [altocello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/altocello/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Serenity: "My Turn" {fanart}](https://archiveofourown.org/works/985845) by [altocello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/altocello/pseuds/altocello). 
  * Inspired by [You Aim to Misbehave](https://archiveofourown.org/works/696925) by [teprometo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/teprometo/pseuds/teprometo). 
  * Inspired by [Ain't We Just {fanart}](https://archiveofourown.org/works/407812) by [altocello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/altocello/pseuds/altocello). 



> Endless, endless thanks to everyone offering up their fanworks for the amazing CamelotRemix! I had SO MUCH FUN working in this universe (again), and I hope everyone has just as much fun reading it. Please note that this fic is primarily a fusion with the movie Serenity and does contain MAJOR spoilers! So go watch it; it's FABULOUS!
> 
> The end notes contain a handy-dandy reference of how I was matching up characters between Merlin and Firefly, and some footnotes.
> 
> Thanks to jelazakazone for being my amazing beta and cheerleader.

It’s too loud inside. Their minds are shrill as banshees, and less humane. It suffocates you. The vacuum outside is cold and clear, all silence and pinpricks of light like drops of dew on a spider’s web as black as the night behind it.

Gwaine’s feet are propped on the table, and the mud caked in the grooves of his boot-soles is beautiful. His knife makes a _shik-shik-shik_ noise as he slides its edge along the sharpening stone, and it entrances you. Your fingers twitch, want to dance their way to the earth falling from Gwaine’s feet, but he catches you looking, raises an eyebrow at you, and your hand squeezes into a fist at your side.

“Red!” you say, because it’s red-red-red when you look at him and you fear he might drown.

Gwaine glares over at Morgause, says, “Doc, get your moon-brained sister out of my face. I got work to do.”

“Last I checked, the mess was for everyone. If you’d like privacy, I suggest you take it to your bunk. God knows no one will disturb you there.”

Morgause catches your eye, gives you a don’t-antagonise-the-man-with-the-giant-knife stare. You understand this. You know it—knew it before it happened—but that doesn’t change anything.

You bunch your hands in your skirt, because they want to touch, and you can’t let them do that. Tighter and tighter until your fingers are numb, and all in a flash you’re just bones, just ash, just scattered molecules in another star system where there’s no one to talk about Earth That Was or fill your head with needles and lies, because you have no head and there are no lies where there’s nothing at all.

“ _Mei mei_ ,” Morgause says, and her hands on your wrists plant your feet on the deck, but in the time between when she calls to you and when she touches you, you see Gwaine’s stare, and you wonder if your blood has come because it’s like something grotesque, but when you look down it’s just your thigh, and the blood is coming from a gash in his thumb, where the knife slipped when Morgause called you back.

The order is wrong, and things are all jumbled, and Morgause is settling your skirt back down around your ankles and rubbing blood back into your hands. Blood. Hands. Gwaine’s thumb in his mouth, his blood on your thighs, _oh, god_ , what’s real?

Gwaine pulls his thumb out of his mouth and looks at it, and his teeth are shiny with blood. “Red,” you say, pointing at the fluid oozing from the gash in Gwaine’s digit.

“Girl knows things she shouldn’t,” Gwaine says, then grabs his knife and stone and stuffs a hunk of bread in his mouth before hulking out of the mess.

* * *

There’s a fire inside you, burning, burning, and Merlin tells you not to be afraid, that fire can cleanse. He’s nice to you, gentle. He puts oils in your hair and on your hands, makes you soft and new. When Gwen chases you around the cargo hold later, your braid falls loose, and the scent of wildflowers swirls all around you.

You’re breathless and giddy to have a day away from the medical bay, from the line of worry taking up permanent residence on Morgause’s brow. You turn around, expecting to see Gwen behind you, but all that’s there is an empty corridor.

You’re outside the crew quarters, and you can hear them down below. Arthur cleaning his guns. Isolde and Tristan’s bickering punctuated with kisses. Gwaine doing chin-ups, his breathing coming out heavy and regular.

Your legs move themselves, and you’ve got two feet down the ladder into Gwaine’s quarters. Rough fingers run the length of your calf from heel to the hollow behind your knee just as the familiar echo of combat boots alerts you of Gwen’s approach.

“Not even hiding down there will stop me from tickling you!” Gwen says, her smile a sun in the gloom of the corridor.

It isn’t until you’ve skittered away back into the belly of Serenity that you register the feeling of soft, wet lips against the side of your foot.

The fire returns.

* * *

You wake up suffocating, bound up tight in your sheets and so sweat-wet it’s as though someone has tried to drown you in your sleep.

It’s Gwaine you see, wide and powerful, massive and holding you—holding you so tight it’s all you can do to squirm against him, searching for something, some kind of release that’s just outside your grasp.

You’ve got his manhood clenched in your palm, and he lets you go. You wonder if he’d have kept you if only your touch had been gentle.

“этo курам на смех1!”

* * *

It’s alive in you now. All that grace and skill, the knowing too acute to be intuition, the power—Miranda2 lit the match that set fire to the safeguards in your mind, all the inhibitions melting into nothing as you are reborn into fierceness.

Morgause is better than you deserve. You’re dangerous, a weapon, and you try to make her _see_ —you’re not worth saving. But she holds your head in her hands, tells you you’re precious, and you know she would die for you. You can’t let that happen. You won’t.

Gwaine would kill you if there weren’t so much profit in selling you, but he can’t turn down a good payload, even though he never took your copper or gave you his kiss3. So you give him your fists instead, and it makes you shiver how the purple of your knuckles matches the yellow swelling on his jaw perfectly—a visceral, enduring memory of your touch.

* * *

The bullet in Morgause’s gut narrows your world to a singular purpose: protect them.

You don’t shut down this time. You _choose_. Each fractured bone, the blood spraying from bodies that once belonged to men, now hollowed out and filled with the screams of demons—you feel it all … savour it all. They want to kill you, to tear skin from flesh, to suck the marrow from your bones, to fill your holes and utterly devour you.

You hate them. _Hate_ them. Pity is gone, left with the dead on Miranda. You’ve killed a dozen of them now, but you’ve seen the vast space they occupy, seen the cities they came from. And you know you’ll never be satisfied until all the Reavers have met bullet or blade.

You only wish more of them had made it planetside so you could cut them down, shred them into piles of viscera and bone. The hatred burns.

Eviscerated bodies at your feet, the blast doors open and the crew sees you for the first time. You’re covered in blood, your white dress tarnished with the rust-coloured remains of a battle that only made you hungry for more.

The wall explodes behind you, Alliance guns trained at your back. All their eyes—Morgause’s, Arthur’s, Gwen’s, Isolde’s, Merlin’s—they tell you to stand down. To drop your weapons. All of them but Gwaine, whose gaze says, _Do it_.

* * *

Gwaine’s fingers are rough where they push into you, as comfortable with your sex as they are with a gun. You claw and bite at him until he bleeds, until he shoves his cock inside you and smears his blood up your arms, down your thighs, over the small of your back.

You overpower him, ride him until he’s a whimpering mess, burning and helpless beneath you. When you press your lips to his mouth, he swallows you down, compliant and greedy.

When you come, the stars reach in to meet you, the universe concentrated in the small space of Gwaine’s quarters.

* * *

You and Gwaine stand at far ends of the funeral: sentinels. Shields.

Isolde is calm and beautiful in her white dress as she approaches Tristan’s grave, and Gwen’s helpless sobs claw at you. Hands become fists at your sides, and in your mind, you’re already laying waste to the Reavers, the Alliance, everyone in the ‘Verse whose carelessness led to this pain.

Gwaine’s lips tighten around his cigar, and you catch his eyes. The hunger in his stare matches what you feel deep in your gut: the burning need to destroy those who would hurt the ones you love.

* * *

You always thought you were the storm, that Serenity and her crew would never be safe until you’d been blown away.

“It ain’t all buttons and charts, little albatross,” Arthur tells you from Tristan’s seat on the bridge, sad and strong in equal measure like always. He looks at you like a father would—not your father, who abandoned you, despised you, surrendered you to ruin. He tells you about love, and you smile at him because he can teach you a great many things, but he has no idea how much love there is inside you.

And now you understand that you’re the guide, the way through the bleakness and lightning trying to overtake your home, your family. You take the helm, set the course, emerge above the clouds, victorious.

**Author's Note:**

> Arthur = Captain Malcolm Reynolds | Gwaine = Jayne | Gwen = Kaylee | Isolde = Zoe | Merlin = Inara | Morgana = River | Morgause = Simon | Tristan = Wash | not pictured: Gaius = Shepherd Book, because obviously
> 
> Footnotes:  
> 1 In Serenity, this is River’s safeword, which makes her fall asleep. Literally, in English, it means, “For the hens to laugh at.”  
> 2 In Serenity, Miranda is the name of the planet River’s borrowed memories lead the crew to, where they discover the truth behind the Reavers.  
> 3 A reference to the Firefly episode “Ariel.” River wakes from her medically induced death-like state and says to Jayne, “Copper for a kiss.”


End file.
